Self-hosted PaaS on Docker
Anyport vs Coolify
If your servers run Docker and you are happy there, use Coolify. It is free under Apache-2.0, it has the largest community in this category by a wide margin, and nothing here is an argument that it is worse at what it does.
The two products separate on one fact: Coolify's documented orchestration is Docker, and Anyport only runs on Kubernetes. Choosing between them is mostly choosing which of those two you want to operate.
What both of them do
This much is common ground, so the table below is only about where they differ.
- Push to a Git branch and it builds and rolls out.
- Automatic HTTPS on your own domains.
- Databases and one-click services next to your applications.
- Logs, environment variables and a terminal into a container.
- Your workloads run on hardware you own and pay for directly.
Where they differ
The short answer first, and the detail underneath it where the short answer would otherwise mislead.
| Coolify | Anyport | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Coolify A self-hosted PaaS You install it on your own Linux servers. | Anyport A hosted control plane For Kubernetes clusters you already run. |
| Runtime | Coolify Docker Docker Engine 24 or newer. Swarm for multiple nodes, documented as experimental. | Anyport Kubernetes Anyport can install k3s on a bare machine if you do not have a cluster. |
| Where the control plane runs | Coolify On your server You install, upgrade and back it up. | Anyport Hosted by us There is nothing for you to install, upgrade or back up. |
| How it reaches your infrastructure | Coolify It connects in, over SSH Using a key it puts in the root user's authorized_keys file. | Anyport Your cluster connects out The agent dials us and holds one connection open. |
| What your infrastructure must expose | Coolify An SSH endpoint it can reach | Anyport Nothing No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server. |
| Who provisions the machines | Coolify You do | Anyport You do By design. We sell no compute, so there is none to mark up. |
| Price | Coolify Free to self-host Apache-2.0, with a paid cloud option. | Anyport Free today Up to 10 private and 20 public clusters. Compute is never metered. |
| Compliance | Coolify None claimed No certification appears in the documentation. | Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead. |
What Coolify is
Taken from their own documentation, read on 4 September 2026.
Coolify installs on a Linux server and deploys containers to it. Its documented requirement is Docker Engine 24 or newer, and it reaches other servers over SSH with key authentication, with its public key in the root user's authorized_keys file.
Multi-server work is Docker Swarm, which Coolify's own scalability page marks experimental. Kubernetes does not appear in the documentation as a supported orchestrator.
It is Apache-2.0 and free to self-host, with a paid cloud option, and it carried roughly 60,000 GitHub stars when we last measured on 22 August 2026.
Choose Coolify if
- Your workloads are Docker or Docker Compose and you have no reason to introduce Kubernetes.
- You want the control plane on your own machine, under a licence you can read, with no vendor in the path at all.
- You value a large community, a long history of releases and 280 or so one-click services.
- You are one person or a small team on one or two VPSes. Kubernetes is overhead you would be paying for nothing.
Choose Anyport if
- You already run Kubernetes and want deploys, rollbacks, HTTPS, logs and metrics on top of it rather than a second orchestrator beside it.
- Some of your clusters sit behind NAT, on an edge site, or in a customer's data centre where nothing can dial in.
- You have several clusters and want one console, one set of roles and one audit log across all of them.
- You want managed Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ClickHouse or Qdrant running as Kubernetes operators on your own hardware.
Questions
- Does Coolify support Kubernetes?
- Not according to its documentation. Coolify's documented orchestration is Docker Engine, with Docker Swarm marked experimental on its own scalability page. Kubernetes is not listed as a supported orchestrator.
- Can I use Coolify and Anyport together?
- Yes, and plenty of setups reasonably would. They orchestrate different things. Coolify runs your Docker hosts and Anyport runs your Kubernetes clusters, and neither needs to know about the other.
- What does Anyport require of a cluster?
- A Kubernetes cluster you can run one command against, or a bare Linux machine where Anyport installs k3s first. No inbound port, no public IP, no load balancer that can obtain one, and no kubeconfig handed to us. The agent opens a connection outward and holds it open.
- What does Anyport cost?
- Every feature is free today, for everyone on your team, on up to 10 private clusters and 20 public ones. Compute is never metered because it is not ours. The one counted resource is traffic our gateway carries for clusters with no public address of their own, with an allowance of 10 GiB a month.
- Is Anyport audited or certified?
- Not yet. In place of a report, the security page documents what the agent runs with inside your cluster, what crosses the boundary and how secrets are stored, so a reviewer can evaluate the controls directly. Two of them hold regardless of certification: we never receive credentials for your Kubernetes API, and your workloads keep serving whether or not our control plane is reachable.
Sources
Read on 4 September 2026. If one of these pages now says something different, the source is right and this page is stale.
If Anyport is the one you want
Connecting a cluster is one command and takes a few minutes. Everything is free today, and the pricing page lists the limits that are actually enforced rather than the ones a plan would imply.